[Peace-discuss] Paul Street's address to US.

[Morton K. Brussel]

For those who missed his talk here last month:

==================================

ZNet Commentary
The Repair of Broken Societies Begins at Home October 13, 2006
By Paul  Street

A shortened version of this presentation was delivered at the  
Community United Church of Christ at a meeting sponsored by the Anti- 
war Anti-Racism Effort (AWARE) in Champaign, Illinois on September  
26, 2006

  Here we are, ten thousands miles away, fighting for the so-called  
freedom of the Vietnamese when we have not put our own house in order

- Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968

THE REPAIR OF BEOKEN SOCIETIES BEGINS AT HOME

The topic I want to flesh out tonight around this theme that "the  
repair of broken societies begins at home" is less than original both  
in my own writing and more generally on the intellectual and  
political culture of the American left going back to the 19th  
century. I did a piece with the exact same title for Dissident Voice  
(DV) in July of 2003. I wrote a similar article for the same journal  
in June that same year.  The title of that article was "Failed States  
at Home and Abroad."

Both essays had pretty much the same argument that Noam Chomsky would  
make in the last chapter of his 2006 book Failed States.  My thesis  
was that Americans looking around for a failed, broken, badly  
governed and authoritarian sociopolitical order to fix and turn into  
a democratic success need search no further than their own county.  
They could start by taking an honest look in the national mirror.

The first DV article was sparked by an elite policy document I  
happened to read in May of 2003.  The document was issued by the  
prestigious Council on Foreign Relations on the eve of the U.S.  
invasion of Iraq.  Bearing the interesting title "Iraq: the Day  
After," this text contained a fascinating comment from a leading  
policy thinker named James Dobbins.  At the time Dobbins was Director  
of the Rand Corporation's Center for International Security and  
Defense Policy.  He was a former special U.S. envoy during U.S.  
interventions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

"The partisan debate," Dobbins proclaimed, "is over.  Administrations  
of both [U.S. political] parties are clearly prepared to use American  
military force to repair broken societies."  Broken societies,  
Dobbins explained, give rise to terrorism and to events like the  
jetliner attacks of September 11th, 2001 It is in our national  
interest, Dobbins argued, to find and fix "broken societies" around  
the world in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan.

The second DV article - the one with "failed states" in the title -  
was sparked by an article in the New York Times in June of 2003 -  
June 9th to be exact.  The story, written by Times reporter Elizabeth  
Becker, noted that a bipartisan federal "Commission on Weak States  
and U.S. National Security" had issued a report recommending that the  
U.S. do more to "improve societies" that are being badly governed by  
"failed states." "Failed states," the report argued, are "breeding  
grounds for terrorists" of the sort who perpetrated 9/11. By Becker's  
account, following the report, "failed states" are "those that  
generally cannot provide security for their citizens or their  
territory, and that are corrupt and illegitimate in the eyes of their  
civilians."

As we know, our policy and opinion leaders have a very good idea of  
where the "broken societies" and "failed states" of the world would  
do best to look for a positive role model.  The world's miserable  
failures should look of course to the United States, the purported  
epitome and agent of what that the Pentagon's calls "the single  
sustainable model of national development."

As Bill Clinton's Secretary of States Madeline Albright once  
proclaimed, the United States "stands taller and sees farther" than  
all other nations. And as U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R- 
Texas) explained in a 2002 speech supporting the granting of  
unlimited war powers to George W. Bush, the U.S. is "The Beacon to  
the World of the Way Life Should Be." We are the "City on a Hill," as  
John Winthrop put it; we are "the watchtower on the walls of  
freedom," in the words of John F. Kennedy.  We are "the greatest  
nation in the world," as our politicians feels compelled to say over  
and over again.  God has blessed and continues to bless America. So  
look to us when you want to know hoot to fix your state and society.

A BROKEN SOCIETY AT HOME

Or maybe not. I find it remarkable to hear the U.S. so cavalierly,  
routinely, and narcissistically described as the ultimate model and  
agent of democratic Success when it has become the most grotesquely  
unequal and wealth-top-heavy society in the industrialized world, the  
world's unchallenged incarceration leader and the only industrialized  
state NOT to make access to basic health care a core birthright. The  
nation that "stands taller and sees farther" than others has become  
something of an openly acknowledged corporate plutocracy, a dollar  
democracy where politics, policy, information, culture, behavior and  
the structure of daily life are routinely,  transparently and  
relentlessly dominated by the selfish desires of the investor class.

Here were some basic facts of life in "The Beacon to the World of the  
Way Life Should Be," from the time right before the planes hit the  
towers and when the U.S. had just come off the longest continuous  
economic expansion in its history:

* The richest ten percent owned more than 70 of the nation's wealth  
and the richest 1 percent of families owned more than 40 percent of  
that wealth.

* 11 million U.S. households were "food insecure," recurrently short  
of enough to eat and 23 million Americans relied on Second Harvest  
food banks to get by

* Forty-two million Americans lacked health insurance

* Americans had the longest working hours in the industrialized  
world, having outpaced the exhausted Japanese during the 1980s -  
something which helped make informed, active, and sustained civic  
engagement next to impossible for untold millions of ex-citizens in  
"the world's greatest democracy".

* Overwork was a factor in the nation's astonishing 60 percent  
divorce rate.

* Nine corporations owned more than half all media (both print and  
electronic), exercising a measure of concentrated private influence  
over public information, imagery and consciousness that was without  
precedent in world history.

* Black families' median net worth was one tenth of white families'  
media net worth - ten black cents on the white dollar.

* There were 29,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S. each year.  Fifty- 
eight percent were suicides and 38 percent were homicides.

* The U.S. had the highest death row population in the world and the  
nation that proclaimed itself the homeland and headquarters of world  
freedom housed 5 percent of the world's people but 25 percent of its  
prisoners,

* On any given day, 30 percent of African-American adults were "under  
correctional supervision" - either in prison or jail or on probation  
or parole.

* One in five black American males possessed a prison record; one in  
three possessed a felony record, and the sitting president of the  
United States owed his presidency among other things to the lifetime  
electoral disenfranchisement of predominantly black ex-felons in  
Florida.

* Less than 1 percent of the population accounted for 80 percent of  
all campaign contributions. The winners of the campaign finance  
fundraising contest won 92 percent of the elections for the U.S.  
house and 88 percent of the Senate races.

* Americans were so excited about their world-leading "democracy"  
that they exhibited the lowest voter turnout in the "democratic" world.

When 9/11 happened and then when the war on Iraq was initiated, I was  
sitting in an urban "civil rights" and social policy research office  
in the middle of Chicago's South Side ghetto putting together 2000  
census and a whole bunch of other data that encouraged me to develop  
a skeptical perspective on our claims of unmatched national  
greatness. I was regularly reviewing a seemingly endless series of  
data sets reflecting the incredible price that people pay for empire  
and inequality at the bottom of the nation's interrelated class and  
race structures.

One of the many terrible findings that stuck with me was the  
discovery that Illinois placed 20,000 more black males in prison than  
it did in its public 4-year undergraduate college programs. Another  
one I couldn't shake was more than a quarter of the children lived in  
"deep poverty" - at less than half the federal poverty level - in 15  
of the city's 77 officially designated Community Areas in 1999. All  
but one of these 15 neighborhoods was located in predominantly black  
stretches of Chicago's South and West Sides.

There were six very predominantly black neighborhoods where more than  
40 percent of the children were deeply poor and one (Riverdale) where  
more than half the children lived in deep poverty. This was before  
the onset of recession in 2001, which pushed the number of black  
children living in deep poverty in the United States over one  
million?  Talk about a "broken society!"

In a recent issue of the New Yorker there's an interesting article by  
David Remnick about Bill Clinton's career as an ex-president. At some  
point in the article, Reminick quotes Bill Gates and Clinton talking  
about how they hope to bring African children the "same opportunities  
available to kids in the United States." It's a noble objective but I  
want to ask them: the same opportunities as WHICH AMERICAN KIDS, Mr.  
President and Mr. CEO? The ones in Lake Forest Illinois, where median  
household income is $120,000 and the "public schools" spend more than  
$20,000 per kid per year or the ones in the South Side neighborhood  
of Riverdale, where median household income is $13,000, where the  
official unemployment rate is 35 percent and where the "public"  
schools spend $6 to 7,000 per year on the children.

To quote Jonathan Kozol: "These are extraordinary inequalities within  
a metropolitan community that still lays claim to certain vestiges of  
the humanitarian ideals associated with the age of civil rights and  
the unforgotten dreams of Dr. Martin Luther King."

LOOKING FOR A FAILED STATE?

You want to see a failed state, unwilling and/or unable to protect  
and provide security for its citizens and territory? You don't have  
to go to Sudan or Iraq. Look at the Bush administration's failure to  
act in basic sorts of ways on numerous indications that the 9/11  
attacks were coming.

Look at the federal government's failure to act on all but a few of  
its own  handpicked 9/11 Commission's basic recommendations on  
preventing future predictable attacks even as it engages in an  
incredibly provocative and nakedly imperialist war on the Middle East.

It fails to act even as it has long pursued a global-corporate  
neoliberal agenda that encourages state failure by undermining the  
positive social and democratic functions of government and thereby  
helps drive Arab and other Muslims into fundamentalist organizations  
that recruit untold thousands of future terrorists.

I'm guessing that many of you here saw the weekend' news reports  
detailing the findings of a classified national U.S. intelligence  
report which confirms what we've known for some time - that "the  
American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new  
generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist  
threat has grown since the September 11 attacks" thanks in large  
measure to the deeply inciting state-terrorist war on Iraq.

We should add the U.S.-sponsored Israel attack on Lebanon to the list  
of the factors that are inciting the Arab and Muslim populations and  
worsening the terror threat.   People eager to discover state failure  
could look at the federal government's failure to maintain levees and  
protect wetlands prior to Katrina.

They can examine the state's miserable and humiliating response to  
that hurricane's aftermath - a reflection not of government  
incompetence per se but the ruling neoliberalism's hostility to all  
government functions save war-making, the repression of dissent and  
other measures designed to make the investor class wealthier.

We can investigate the government's failure to act against the  
looming catastrophe of global warming that appears to have been part  
of the Katrina story.

Pretty much all the terrible social terrible indicators I mentioned  
above have gotten worse since 9/11 and the onset of an overdue  
recession that started the previous year. Child poverty and deep  
community poverty are both back on the rise. Black household net  
worth has fallen to 7 cents on the white dollar.

According to the Current Population and American Community Surveys,  
the black poverty rate in Chicago has gone from 29 percent in 2000 to  
33 percent in 2004; it's back to the worst levels of the late Reagan  
era. As the New York Times reported a few weeks back, the top fifth  
of income recipients now gets more than half of the nation's income.   
That's never happened before as far as we know from Labor Department  
data to date.

The U.S. poverty rate has gone up for five years in a row.  That's  
never happened as long as the federal government has collected  
national poverty statistics. The top 1 percent now owns more than  
half the nation's wealth - a positively Gilded Age statistic. The  
bottom 20 percent has seen its paycheck fall by 20 percent in the  
last five years even as Fortune 500 CEO salaries increased by more  
than 50 percent to an average of more than $8 millions per year. It  
would be a gross understatement, a misstatement actually, to say that  
the U.S. government has merely failed to act in response to deepening  
domestic poverty and inequality.

More than merely failing to move against homeland disparities, it has  
actively exacerbated homeland disparities through a deadly mix of  
Empire and Inequality. It has combined huge tax cuts for the already  
super-wealthy few with massive increases in military spending to pay  
for an illegal and unnecessary occupation that has killed more than a  
100,000 Iraqi civilians.Beneath solemn claims of reverence for the  
victims of 9/11, the in-power hard right has seized on that great  
crime as a welcome opportunity.

Nine-eleven was for them a salutary occasion to deepen the  
concentration of wealth and power, to further the repression of  
dissent at home and to tighten their grip on super-strategic Middle  
Eastern oil supplies while funneling billions of taxpayer dollars to  
leading so-called "defense" corporations like Boeing, Raytheon and  
the rest.One of the strangest parts of all this and it speaks volumes  
about the real White House agenda is to see the Bush administration  
advancing tax cuts for the rich while at the same obsessively  
proclaiming that we are in a life or death war to save civilization  
as we know it.

When the government needs to fight such a war, like some would argue  
was the case during World War II, it doesn't cut taxes on those who  
possess the greatest amount of wealth to help to pay for it.

Right here in the U.S., we are witnessing an especially perverse form  
of state failure and related plutocratic success on a truly  
remarkable scale.

THE MYTH OF THE POWERLESS STATE

It's very important, I think, that we not confuse this homeland state  
failure with what I call the myth of the powerless state.  The  
corporate-neoliberal ideology that has ruled America since at least  
the early 1980s is commonly described by critics as anti-government.  
There's some real deception there.  The reality is more complex.    
Conventional ideological wisdom to the contrary, the public sector  
today retains the resources and wherewithal to carry out certain key  
objectives favored by the rich and powerful.

Its cup runs over when it comes to serving the needs of wealth,  
racial disparity, corporate (top-down) globalization, and empire.   
Its poverty and powerlessness come into play when we are talking  
about health, education, welfare, rehabilitation, social uplift,  
community development and ecological sustainability for the many and  
especially when we are talking about services for the  
disproportionately nonwhite poor.

Increasingly stripped of lost social and democratic functions  
government is inadequate and cash-poor only when it comes to meeting  
the needs of the nonaffluent majority and especially of the  
disproportionately black, .urban, concentrated, and demonized poor.  
Its relationship to the non-affluent and especially the black poor is  
increasing weighted towards policing and repressive functions, which  
have expanded dramatically in ways that are more than just  
coincidentally related to the assault on social supports and programs.

To use the suggestive terminology of the late left sociologist Pierre  
Bourdieu, the dominant homeland ideologies of neoliberalism  and  
neoconservatism starve the "left" hand of the state and feed "the  
right hand of the state." It's the social, nurturing, egalitarian,  
democratic, and peaceful parts of the public sector that need to be  
starved, not the regressive, disciplinary, repressive, militaristic,  
and authoritarian parts of government.

THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY?

One of the scariest parts of all this is that this drift from the  
left to the right of the state is actually opposed by the majority of  
American citizens. In poll after poll, public survey researchers  
report that Americans prefer spending on health, education, and  
social welfare and rehabilitation and training and ecological  
protection over war and militarism and incarceration and corporate  
welfare and surveillance and weaponry and environmental rape.

The most chilling thing about recent American history to me is that  
none of this seems to matter in terms of policy.  Noam Chomsky has  
been talking lately about the nation's democracy deficit, a hidden  
corollary of its fiscal deficit.

We have a radical disconnect between public opinion and public policy  
that is starting to lead many serious investigators to wonder if the  
American experiment with democracy is now finally and completely  
exhausted.

Right now, in this election season, we see Bush saying that we are  
fighting in Iraq in the name of an ideology which says that  
government must "reflect the will of the people."  Then he says there  
will be no troop reductions this year and there will be no timetable  
for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq.  He and Rumsfeld and Cheney  
run around denouncing supposed elite liberal war opponents for  
advocating the deadly appeasement of "Islamofascist" terrorism. And  
during all of this leading national polls report say that 61 percent  
of Americans want troops reduced this year, that 60 percent oppose  
the war, and that 57 percent want a timetable for withdrawal.

The species is in dire straits indeed if this is what we get from  
world's "single sustainable model of national development."

"YOUR NATIONAL GREATNESS AND SWELLING VANITY"

Pointing out the contradiction between ugly domestic realities and  
the idealistic discourse and proclaimed noble and democratic goals of  
the nation and its foreign policy is an old activity on the American  
left. "Who are you," we and other Americans have long told our power  
elite and its many defenders,  "to speak of defending and/or  
embodying and/or exporting democracy and freedom when you are  
beneficiaries and/or agents of monumental inequality, repression, and  
oppression right here at home, in the supposed homeland and  
headquarters of liberty, justice, and compassionate human concern?"

This goes back a long way. I think of Frederick Douglass's marvelous  
speech, titled "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?." Douglass's  
famous address was delivered four years after the United States had  
claimed to bring democracy to Southwestern North America by  
militarily annexing present day California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada,  
and New Mexico.

The Mexican Cession, as it was called in the U.S., led among other  
things to the reintroduction of slavery into the Southwest, where the  
ownership of humans had been outlawed by the Mexican government.   
With that as a background, listen to some of the exceptional prose  
that the escaped slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass  
read aloud on July Fourth, 1852, five years before the United States  
Supreme court would rule that Dred Scott blacks possessed no human  
rights whatsoever by virtue of their race:

"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?. A day that  
reveals to him the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the  
constant victim.  To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted  
liberty an unholy alliance; your national greatness and swelling  
vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your  
denunciation of tyrants brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of  
liberty and equality hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your  
sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and  
solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and  
hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a  
nation of savages."

"Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the  
monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South  
America, search out every abuse [Douglass said], and when you have  
found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices  
of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting  
barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival."

"You hurl your anathemas at the crowned headed tyrants Russia and  
Austria [Douglass said]?.you invite to your shores fugitives of  
oppression from abroad?.you shed tears over fallen Hungary and make  
the sad story of here wrongs the theme of your poets, statesmen, and  
orators?you are all on fire at the mention of liberty for France or  
Ireland?.you can bare your bosom to the storm of British artillery to  
throw off a three-penny tax on tea?.and yet [Douglass intoned] you  
maintain a system as barbarous and dreadful as ever stained the  
character of a nation [and] you are as cold as an iceberg to the  
thought of liberty for the enslaved of America."

I think also of some of the letters black soldiers wrote to black  
U.S. newspapers during the Spanish-American War, when the U.S, seized  
control of the Philippines and Cuba, with President McCKinley  
claiming that the U.S. would "educate the Filipinos, and uplift and  
civilize and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very best we  
could by them."

In one of the aforementioned letters, reproduced in Howard Zinn's  
"People's History of the United States," the chaplain of a black  
regiment asked, "is America any better than Spain?  Has she not  
subjects in her very midst who are murdered daily without a trial of  
judge or jury?  Has she not subjects in her own borders whose  
children are half-fed half-clothed because their father's skin is  
black?.?"

In the period when this letter appeared, numerous progressives,  
laborites, and socialists like Jacob Riis, Algie Simons, Jack London  
and Upton Sinclair observed that immigrant slums were filling with  
masses of desperately poor and super-exploited proletarians.  United  
States government was widely known to be under the iron heel of an  
authoritarian corporate plutocracy that owned not only the means of  
production and distribution but also the lion's share of the  
politicians and policymakers.

There was more than enough social uplift an democracy promotion  
required at home, these and other writers and activists noted.

I think of Randolph Bourne's comment during World War One. "Hearts  
that had felt only ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home,"  
Bourne bitterly observed, now "beat in tune for the struggle for  
freedom abroad."

I think of the connection that the 1960s New Left made between "war  
machines" built for supposed "democracy" defense and promotion abroad  
and "ghetto scenes" reflecting race and class oppression and  
democratic deficits at home.

And I think of Martin Luther King's comment in 1968.  "Here we are,"  
King noted five days before his assassination, "ten thousands miles  
away, fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese when we  
have not put our own house in order. We force young black men and  
young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they  
come back home they can't hardly live on the same block together."

BEYOND THE CHARGE OF HYPOCRISY

Now, our critique of Empire doesn't and shouldn't stop with just  
noting the domestic hypocrisy behind our leaders' global and imperial  
claims. It never has. Like American progressives of the past, I'd  
like to mention six other and related problems with our imperial  
foreign policy.First, the Empire Project not only mocks it also  
deepens inequality and repression at home.  While the benefits of  
empire tend to go primarily to the wealthy few in the elite investor  
class, the costs tends to be spread across the entire society and to  
fall with special high impact on the working and lower classes, who  
suffer most from enlistment and from the diversion of public dollars  
from domestic social health to projects of global dominance.

It was darkly amusing last April to hear the American arch-terrorist  
and National Intelligence chief John Negroponte and other  
administration officials denounce Venezuela and Iran for --- get this  
---  diverting money from domestic expenditures to aggressive foreign  
policy goals. The United States has spent $318 billion on the  
incredibly aggressive and richly provocative and illegal occupation  
of Iraq even as millions of Americans have sunk deeper into poverty  
and hopelessness.

As the National Priorities Project reports, the taxpayer money spent  
by the United States on the war on Iraq between March 2003 and August  
2006 would have paid for the providing of health insurance to 72  
million Americans. It would have paid for the hiring of 5.5 million  
school teachers or the granting of 61 million university scholarships  
or the hiring of 5 millions port container safety inspectors.

Illinois' share of the war's costs would paid for the construction of  
133,000 affordable housing units or the building of more than 1600  
new elementary schools in the state or the provision of health  
insurance to more than 2 million people.  For five years now, people  
who highlight and criticize these "perverted national priorities" (as  
King called them) have been painted out as dangerously divisive and  
unpatriotic trouble-makers, objective allies of the evil terrorists  
and their war on freedom.

Specific wars aside, its worth that the federal government pays 29  
dollars on so-called defense for every four dollars it spends on  
education, for every six dollars it spends in income security, for 3  
dollars it spends on nutrition, and for every three cents it spends  
on job training. That so-called defense budget pays for an  
astonishing apparatus of what Pentagon insiders call "forward global  
force projection" that involves the maintenance of over military  
bases on foreign soil and which outspend the military budget of the  
rest of the world.

Much of the opulent "defense" budget amounts to a spectacular public  
subsidy to powerful high-tech corporations like Boeing and Raytheon,  
who have enjoyed unusually high and distinctively high rates of  
return ever since the beginning of the beginning of the so called war  
on terror. "A nation that spend more on militarism than on programs  
of social uplift," Martin Luther King said in 1967, "is approaching  
spiritual death."

Second, war and militarism function as a method to distract ordinary  
working people from thinking and acting in collective ways about  
their shared interests and their need to fight together against the  
homeland plutocracy.

Third, war and empire have always provided pretexts for the  
repression of domestic dissent.  They continue to create  
opportunities for concentrated power to portray social justice and  
democracy activists as objective allies of "the enemy."

Fourth, it is inherently absurd to claim or think that democracy can  
be exported from one state to another through the barrel of a gun.  
Democratic change has to emerge from within.

Fifth, U.S. policymakers generally speak disingenuously when they say  
they want meaningful democracy and freedom in the other nations they  
are attacking, occupying or otherwise seeking to control.

"Democracy" promotion is cover talk for their deeper hidden agenda,  
which is to enforce foreign state insertion within a broader U.S.  
dominated world system wherein their primary role is to serve  
American economic and political power.

As Chomsky has been saying for some time now, the notion that the  
U.S. policy makers of either party want to see true national self  
determination and democracy in oil-rich Iraq is a just a pure fairly  
tale. U.S. policymakers are not about to physically abandon Iraq  
unless they are just absolutely forced to leave.

Iraq and the Middle East's strategic oil reserves are just to great  
for that and America's declining economic position in the world  
system is too weak to expect policymakers of either dominant business  
part to just say "okay, go ahead and cut whatever deals you want with  
that oil." Sixth, our foreign policy, both "soft"/economic and "hard"/ 
military is profoundly damaging to foreign peoples and states. It is  
more damaging to them than it is to even poor Americans in all  
likelihood, which brings me to a point I want to make on the false  
Republican dichotomy of "Stay the Course" versus "Cut and Run" in Iraq.

THE FALSE DICHOOTOMY OF "STAY THE COURSE" VERSUS "CUT AND RUN"

It will not do morally speaking simply to take a sort of left-wing  
America First approach.  It is insufficient in my opinion just to  
advocate that stop attacking others and pour the money saved from  
militarism into domestic social programs.  We have to move resources  
from the militaristic and plutocratic right hand of the state to the  
social and democratic left hand of the state in our foreign policy as  
well as in our domestic policy.

We should reject the false, all-or-nothing framing of the choices in  
Iraq as either "stay the course" or "cut and run."  We should replace  
that black and white duality with a more responsible tensions between  
(1) "attack, dominate and destroy" versus (2) "acknowledge, heal, and  
repair." We need to reject number 1 and embrace number 2.

We will have to pay significant reparations overseas geared to the  
reconstruction of developing and other states we have viciously  
assaulted for decades. While we should leave militarily, something  
that would damp down the insurgency and perhaps force Iraqis to co- 
exist peacefully, we do have a moral obligation to be a major part of  
the solution through a change in the emphasis of our policy from  
repressive force to reparations and uplift.

We have been badly damaging Iraqi society for a very long time,  
including of course the deadly sanctions period.  We don't need to  
cut and run.  We need to heal and repair. We need to contribute to  
solutions over there in other ways than just leaving.

HOPEFUL SIGNS

Some of this material can get depressing so I want to conclude by  
noting some positive and hopeful developments.  There are some  
encouraging signs at home.  We've known for some time from serious  
opinion surveys that when asked the majority of American people  
support a number of policy choices that fit the progressive  
perspective against Empire and Inequality.

A Chicago Council of Foreign Relations survey two years ago found  
that Americans ranked support for education, health care, welfare and  
Social Security far above so-called defense spending when it comes to  
preferred government expenditure.

Nearly three fourths thought the U.S. should remove its troops from  
Iraq if that's what the majority of Iraqis want (and by the way we  
know from British intelligence that 83 percent of Iraqis wanted that  
in 2005).

Seventy three percent of Americans thought the U.S. needed to work  
more closely with other countries to effectively combat terrorism.   
Nearly nine in ten supported working through the United Nations and  
international law.  The percentage who thought the U.S. should put  
more emphasis on diplomacy was twice the percentage that thought we  
should put more on military approaches.  Less than 1 in 5 supported  
Bush's preemptive war doctrine.

A majority supported general compliance with the rulings of the World  
Court.  Three fourths supported giving the International court the  
right to try American military and civilian officials for war crimes  
and 71 percent supported the Kyoto accord on global warming.

Domestically, large majorities think that corporations have too much  
power in the U.S. They support various measures to level the  
political playing field, including significant campaign finance  
reform.  They prefer treatment and rehabilitation over mass  
incarceration, environmental protection, school-funding equity and a  
whole list of decent, socially and ecologically healthy and balanced  
policies and programs.

By the fall of last year, half of the population said the war on Iraq  
was NOT morally justified whereas 75 percent had said it was  
justified in March 2003.

According to a New York Times/CBS poll this month, we now have for  
the first time a majority of the population rejecting the  
administration's efforts to link the war on Iraq with the war on  
terror.According to a CNN poll in August, 60 percent of the  
population opposes the war on Iraq.  Sixty one percent believe that  
some troops should be removed before the end of the year and 57  
percent want a timetable for full withdrawal.

We now have a big majority of the population saying the country would  
be better off if the current war party in power was removed from  
office. The Bushcons have been unable to shake the image of failure  
hung on them by Iraq and Katrina even with a mild economic expansion  
and the surprising lack of a major terror attack on U.S. since 9/11.  
The defeat of the Republicans in upcoming mid-term Congressional  
elections and if that happens it could open the door to some very  
serious investigations and proceedings against the Cheney-Rove cabal.

An antiwar electoral rebellion in Connecticut has put forward a  
Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate who might be a millionaire  
but who feels compelled to make connections between the cost of the  
war on Iraq and the under-funding of schools and social programs in  
the U.S.

This is all good news. The population is beginning to wake up from  
the big Orwellian post-9/11 nightmare. It's starting to shake off the  
heavily propagated hatred of government per se and to see that the  
particular ruling right-wing version of what passes for governance is  
the problem, not government per se.

Whether it will translate into anything meaningful and progressive in  
the realm of politics and policy remains to be seen.  It is one thing  
to throw some of the hard right bums out of office; it's another  
altogether to compel some new officeholders to receive and act on  
progressive ideals. And as we all know the Democratic Party is far  
from being a progressive change agent.  Its leaders share many of the  
same basic neoliberal assumptions, not to mention funding  
sources,that the Republicans hold so dear.

We need to be honest about the difference between opinion and  
action.  It's one thing to privately express one's disapproval of the  
current policies and regime at a dinner party or over the phone  
talking to a pollster.  It is another and altogether more significant  
thing to act publicly and collectively to punish the vicious actors  
who exploited 9/11 for unsavory purposes and then to build the sort  
of democratic and participatory society and polity where such vile  
actors could never come back into power,

The administration and the current proto-fascistic and hyper- 
plutocratuic party in power know all abut these differences. That's  
how it can put Bush up there the last few weeks to say that America  
is in Iraq to advance an ideology of democracy whereby "government  
responds to the will of the people" while  conducting a foreign and  
also a domestic policy that directly confounds the actual will of the  
American people. It can do that because it doubts that the American  
people are willing and/or able to act effectively on their beliefs in  
a politically meaningful way.

It is counting on corporate media and other cultural and ideological  
authorities to combine with the chaos and overwork and atomization of  
overextended American daily life to keep people weak, anemic,  
alienated and divided.  It is counting also on the power of private  
money and negative campaigning and gerrymandered, winner-take-all  
election procedures and possibly biased election machines. It is  
counting on the Democratic Party to keep functioning as a frightened  
and confused and divided and elite-dominated opposition party only in  
name. And of course, it is counting on what it thinks is its ace in  
the hole --- sheer unmitigated FEAR - to keep us all in line and  
putting our hopes and dreams for democracy and justice on permanent  
hold.

Whether we can and will break through these and other great barriers  
to  democracy and overcome the great disconnect between American  
popular desires and American imperial policy is one of the great  
questions of the 21st century. Given the United States' remarkable  
power in the world, it is a matter of no small significance for the  
entire species. As Noam Chomsky noted in 1969, "the level of culture  
that can be achieved in the United States is a life-and-death matter  
for great masses of suffering humanity."

  Paul Street is a writer and independent social policy research in  
Iowa City, IA.  His first book is Empire and Inequality: America and  
the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004).  His next book is  
Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago  
History (forthcoming in 2007)